After a Long Winter The carpenter ants aren’t clever enough. Sawdust across threshold gives away their terraced apartments. Haul it away, and live another season. A red door, slightly water rotted, gave them easy purchase, and to the colony, wasn’t this a tree unnaturally thin and straight, its casing more secure? Their first job in the universe is excavation. Whatever aids destruction, prevents the forest flaming. Would you be winged or sterile wingless workers? Do you live amongst the colony of females trudging, cutting, carrying? Their life is factory. Winged males emerge on warm days in spring like us with our mowers and rakes. Winged males emerge on warm days in early summer, and the long winter long behind, mating! They have left the dark and cleaned out door. They have left the sawdust betrayal. Mating occurs during brief flight, air, so much air and wind after the still home where everything was path and circle space like a water trail meandered. And even at night, more light—moon-- than the dark they were born to. Imagine how strange even sound might be, and then flight, so freeing. Mating after which the male dies. What, Species, were you thinking? Males unnecessary past this point. Do not enter. Go no further. Dead. Their religion would call it ascension or rapture. Or would they have heaven in soft moist earth and wood? Is every tunnel homage to the ones gone home? Every female is a winged queen sailing the air for mating, up to now when she who has flown, fairy to nature’s moonlit dream, removes her wings, mermaid trading tail, angel coming down to earth. Supernatural called back to ordinary. Wingless, she searches for a nesting site. Let the larvae replace the males who died. the new home is soft, moist, decaying wood of a hollow tree, stump, or log, our porch pillars, door or window casing. We can’t understand-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, be damned-- I swear what drives us is more beautiful. And would the carpenter ants, swear same? Their whitish, soft-bodied, legless larvae later become the sterile female workers. With thanks to the writing of Steve Jacobs, Sr. Extension Associate Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences Laura Lee Washburn is a University Professor, the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Cavalier Literary Couture, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, Red Rock Review, and Valparaiso Review. Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she has also lived and worked in Arizona and in Missouri. She is married to the writer Roland Sodowsky and is one of the founders and the Co-President of the Board of SEK Women Helping Women. https://www.facebook.com/sekwhw Comments are closed.
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